Wonder Woman– This is an awesome game by Made With Code! Code Diana’s fight sequences from the movie

Made With Code – Lots of fun block based games covering everything from fashion design to dancing yetis.

Hour of Code – Dozens of coding activies from Minecraft, The Sims, Disney and many more covering all sorts of coding projects.

A few words before you go…

To all our ninjas – you have done awesomely this year at CoderDojo. Everyone has come on so well since their first session and we are so proud of all of you!

We hope that you keep up coding at home and will be posting some activities online over the summer months for you to try.

To all the parents – thank you for all your support this year. We appreciate the effort put in during the sessions, supporting the kids in their coding and contributions to our fundraising campaigns. Without the support of parents, our dojo would not be able to continue so we are very grateful.

To our mentors – where would we be without you? Thank you to everyone who has attended any of our sessions this year, helped out at external events or assisting in the organisation of the dojo behind the scenes. We hope to see as many of you as possible again in September! For those who are off into the world of employment, we wish all the very best. For those continuing their studies, keep up the great work and if you ever need any help or support from ex-students, just give us a shout!

That’s all from us for 2016/2017. We hope to see you again after the Summer. We plan to resume again with the university term at the end of September but will announce details closer to the time. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get the latest updates, or sign up to our email newsletter.

Good morning everyone! Well it’s almost the end of term so after today we will have only one more session! We will be planning something really fun so stay tuned for more details on that.

Some of you may have heard the surprise announcement that The CoderDojo Foundation has officially merged with The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Code Club. This is awesome news for us as it means that the Code Club learning resources are available to us again. (Previously they were restricted to official Code Clubs only) So we will be making use of these a lot more in sessions to come!

We got even more good news this week when we found out our MicroBits have been dispatched. We are looking forward to starting some cool projects with these in September. In the meantime we want you to do a mini research project.What would you do if you had a Micro Bit? We want you to find out a bit more about Micro Bits – (try searching on Google or having a nosy around the Micro Bit website) and then complete the following project page: https://goo.gl/forms/mhWdAmXz0O7iEAXq2

Once you have completed your Sushi cards, let us know and we can award your Digital Badges!

Finally, many thanks to everyone who has supported our fundraising efforts recently, either through EventBrite, donations or buying our wristbands. You have been more than generous and it is much appreciated. For anyone who missed our last session, we still have wristbands left if you wish to buy one. They cost £1 each and all proceeds go directly into our insurance fund for next term.
Thank you all. We look forward to seeing you at our next session!

Since we’ve seen you all last, a new craze has gripped all schools. Yep, we’re talking about fidget spinners! So we’ve been working on designing our own digital fidget spinner in Scratch. You can check it out here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/161151195/

For all the boys working on the product design project, I want to have the full project ready for publishing by the end of today’s session!

BBC Micro Bits

We are very happy to announce that we have been granted 10 BBC Micro Bits by The CoderDojo Foundation. Micro Bits are mini computers, similar to a Raspberry Pi, which are really fun to code with. They haven’t arrived yet but we are hoping that we receive them before the end of term. If not, they will be our main focus when we return in September.

In the meantime, we want to know: What would you do if you had a Micro Bit? We want all of our ninjas to do a mini research project – find out a bit more about Micro Bits – (try searching on Google or having a nosy around the Micro Bit website) and then complete the following project page: https://goo.gl/forms/mhWdAmXz0O7iEAXq2

Upcoming Events

After today, there will only be 2 more sessions before the end of term. These will take place on Saturday 3rd June and Saturday 17th June. We have not yet set a date for the resuming of sessions in September but it will probably be close to the end of the month when the university reopens.

In the meantime, we will be fundraising in order to cover our insurance costs for the new term. Due to the overwhelming success of our JustGiving campaign last year and finding a better deal than expected with a different broker, we have been able to set aside most of the money for next year’s insurance premium. We do have a bit to go though so to make up the remainder of the cost we will be fundraising at the next few sessions by selling Derry CoderDojo wristbands at a price of £1 each. We would appreciate your support in trying to meet our goal and ensure that we can continue to run as a voluntary service in the next school year.

Welcome to our Easter session! We have plenty of fun activities planned for today.

If this is your first session or if you missed the last one, please check out our last blog post to get up to date on registering as a dojo member and earning digital badges.

As this is our Easter session, our Scratch game today is an Eggscellent Easter Egg Catch. The tutorial is available here: Scratch Tutorial

Coji the Robot is hosting his very own Egg Hunt! We have hidden some chocolate eggs around the room (Hint – follow the signs!) Each team will have 5 mins to see if they can control Coji to find the eggs. The team who finds the most eggs wins! No cheating! Coji has to go over to where the eggs are – you can’t bring the eggs to Coji!

For our intermediate/advanced ninjas – you can continue with your sushi card activities (Links in our previous blog post) or build a Springtime themed game or website.

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a very Happy Easter! We will see you at our next session on Saturday 22nd April.

Sorry Adam and I couldn’t make it to the last session but I hear you all got on great with Orla!

In light of some recent feedback, we are going to try a few new things at Derry CoderDojo. We appreciate all comments from our ninjas, parents and mentors so feel free to have a chat with us during the session, add a comment to this post or contact us online if you have any suggestions.

First of all, we will have a blog post, (just like this one) on our website for the beginning of each session. It will contain all new updates, information and the plan for that session. This will help ninjas who have maybe missed a session to keep up to date with what we’re up to and be a point of reference for parents also. We’ll try it out for a few weeks and if you feel it is helpful we will keep it up.

Due to the fact we are part of the CoderDojo Foundation, we need to be moving towards using their Zen website a bit more. The first step in this is that we now need all ninjas (and mentors!) to be registered as members on it so that the CoderDojo Foundation has a record of numbers. You do not need to register on Zen every week, just the once. If you haven’t already, could all our ninjas take a few minutes now to register on Zen? Just click here and then select “Join Dojo” and follow the instructions. Our events management/tickets will remain on Eventbrite for the time-being, but we may eventually move to using Zen for this also.

Now that you are all members on Zen, we can award you with Digital Badges for completing tasks! There are badges for all sorts of achievements – attendance, learning a new skill, volunteering, etc. The full list of currently available badges is available here

Well done everyone – you’ve just earned your first badge just by being here today! We’ll come around soon and award everyone with their badge

So on to earning more badges…

Beginner Ninjas

Welcome to all our new ninjas today! (And everyone who has been with us for a few weeks too!) All of our beginners will be working on Scratch today. We have some awesome new tutorials to work through which will lead on to working on your own projects.

The ninjas who are working on the product design project to design a PC enclosure will be continuing with creating a 3D model of their design and we will review its features and discuss the best way of manufacturing it.

BBC Microbit is a tiny computer which can be coded to do a lot of fun things.

You can use your BBC micro:bit for all sorts of cool creations, from robots to musical instruments – the possibilities are endless. The micro:bit is a handheld, fully programmable computer being given free to every Year 7 or equivalent child across the UK. It’s 70 times smaller and 18 times faster than the original BBC Micro computers used in schools in the early 1980s.

This little device has an awful lot of features, like 25 red LED lights that can flash messages. There are two programmable buttons that can be used to control games or pause and skip songs on a playlist. Your BBC micro:bit can detect motion and tell you which direction you’re heading in, and it can use a low energy Bluetooth connection to interact with other devices and the Internet – clever!

We quite liked the bundle available on Tech Will Save Us’s website as it came with some additional hardware to extend your project beyond coding just software. e.g. Crocodile clips, a buzzer, sugru, copper tape

#MadeWithCode is a movement dedicated to inspiring young women to get into coding. They have published a list of their top projects from other sites to help you take your code to the next level in new and exciting ways. From Soccer games in Scratch to LED bracelets with Sew Electric, there’s something for everyone here

Mixital is a BBC site with tools to help you make your own games, cartoons, and music videos to share with friends. All games are inspired by your favourite BBC shows including Eastenders, Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who

Arduino is an open-source electronics platform. It can be used as an interface between software and hardware components to make fun interactive projects. To date, many projects have been made at Derry CoderDojo including a synthesizer, magic 8 ball and much more.

Don’t have a arduino board? No problem! 123D Circuits is a free online circuit simulator that allows you to create and code arduino projects.This is a very useful tool to test a project before you make it from physical parts.

CultureTECH – Arduino Demo at BT Young Scientist Tent

The software for writing code to your Arduino board can be downloaded from here

Our pet Lego Mindstorm is possibly the most loved in our dojo and is a perfect project for all ninjas to get stuck into, regardless of age or coding ability.

Lego Mindstorm EV3 is a customisable robot that can be built from Lego and the EV3 “brain”. The brain is programmable using the Lego software which works similar to Scratch. There is no coding knowledge needed, just an understanding of the logic of how the robot should behave.

If you’d like to give coding your own robot a go, download the software here and simulate your project. Once you have perfected it, bring it to the session and we will download it on to our EV3 and see how it works. There are also some great tutorials on the Lego website. If you need some inspiration, check out some of the videos on YouTube to see what other amazing projects have been developed. (Please note though, for some of the more ambitious projects, more than one EV3 brain is needed, and unfortunately we only have one, so bear this in mind when planning your project)

The Lego Digital Designer is a useful program for building virtual lego models.
A useful feature within the program is the selection of real lego kits. By selecting the EV3 ‘31313’ kit you can virtually build a robot that you could then build for real!

Lightbot is a fun game which teaches the logic of programming, without the need for code. It is a lot like Scratch but on a simpler level so is perfect for our very young ninjas and beginners to coding.

This free special edition CoderDojo version of the game takes approximately one hour to complete. It introduces a number of programming concepts such as if-statements and loops without the need to write any code. Click on the image below if you want to give it a go.

Codecademy is one of the top resources that we use at our sessions for many of the topics we teach, including HTML, JavaScript and Python.

We recommend that when you are using this site, sign up for an account and login each time so that you can keep track of how well you are doing and earn special badges as you progress through each section.

Codecademy
Codecademy present an interactive course on JavaScript in an interactive format and take you through the basics of JS programming for websites. This is perfect for beginners who have never learnt any coding languages.

Khan Academy Tutorials
These tutorials are a great resource for anyone who has completed their HTML website and want to tackle some advanced features such as animations or on-screen coding.

For those who want to get creative anywhere, an offline version of Scratch can be downloaded here.

Resources and tutorials

There are plenty of resources and tutorials online to get you started with Scratch. We recommend following the ‘Getting Started with Scratch’ guide which can be downloaded from here. This will give you a good understanding of how Scratch works so you can learn to create your own projects!

Further examples of what you can make in Scratch can be downloaded from here

Our Scratch resources from the This Is Not A Game launch are available for free and can be downloaded here. Everything you need to create your own ocean inspired game is there.